We performed a comparison between Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both products receive high marks from reviewers. However, SentinelOne comes out on top in this comparison due to its impressive security and EDR features, attractive price, and impressive ROI.
"We can automate routine tasks and write scripts to carry out difficult tasks, which makes things easier for us."
"My clients like Defender's file integrity monitoring. They're monitoring Windows and Linux system files."
"It gives a lot of flexibility in terms of configuration and customization as per the business requirements."
"The most valuable feature is the DLP because that's where we can have an added data protection layer and extend it not just to emails but to the documents that users are working on. We can make sure that sensitive data is tagged and flagged if unauthorized parties are using it."
"Within advanced threat hunting, the tables that have already been defined by Microsoft are helpful. In the advanced threat hunting tab, there were different tables, and one of the tables was related to device info, device alert, and device events. That was very helpful. Another feature that I liked but didn't have access to was deep analysis."
"The most valuable feature is the network security."
"We also use Microsoft Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, Defender for Identity, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. They are all integrated and it was very easy to integrate them. In my experience with the integrations, it was just a click of a button and things were integrated. It's just a button."
"Another noteworthy feature that I find appealing in Microsoft Defender is the credit-backed simulation. This feature enables organizations to train their users on effectively responding to phishing emails through a simulated training environment."
"Cortex XDR is a simple platform that's easy for administrators and users. You have a lot of flexibility to change or customize the features."
"This software helps us understand any issues that may arise when someone is not at work."
"Has great threat detection capabilities."
"If there are multiple alerts, the app will automatically create and rate an event instead of going through each one."
"The protection offered by this product is good, as is the endpoint reporting."
"WildFire AI is the best option for this product."
"It blocks malicious files. It prevents attacks. It doesn't require many updates, it's a very light application."
"When the pandemic started, Palo Alto came up with many solutions, which helped with the quick shift from on-premises to the cloud."
"SentinelOne Singularity Complete, together with SentinelOne Vigilance, is an EDR tool with capabilities such as these, which I found valuable: the dashboard that shows you all the information and the power to either manually or automatically quarantine issues or threats in the environment."
"The tool has helped us streamline and centralize things with a single solution. We are a small organization with a handful of people managing multiple sites. It is a simple tool with an easy-to-use UI. The product has an intuitive and up-to-date GUI."
"The single pane of glass is probably the most valuable. That is a big one. We could see everything from one view."
"SentinelOne is very simple to install and very simple to manage. It's very aggressive, so it does protection well, and it seems to be stopping attacks that other solutions cannot."
"I really like deep visibility. Deep visibility is one of the coolest features of almost any tool that we use. The breadth of data that is collected there is valuable, and it gives us the ability to search back through literally tons of data going back a specific period of time."
"SentinelOne has helped us to improve our security by fine-tuning our current use cases and creating new ones."
"The most valuable features of SentinelOne are the lateral movement and the use of the Active Directory."
"The solution can search for hidden and dormant threats on encrypted traffic in your environment."
"The support could be more knowledgable to improve their offering."
"There is no common area where we can manage all the policies for the EDR, third-party solutions, devices, servers, Windows, Mac, etc., but it's on the road map, and we ware waiting for that feature."
"The advanced threat-hunting capabilities are phenomenal, and the security copilot enhances that, but some data elements could be better or have more context inside of the advanced tables themselves. The schemas feel a little limited to what they're building into the product. It's probably just a maturity thing. I imagine we'll see the features I want in the next year."
"Microsoft 365 Defender does not have a unique package with emerging endpoint security technologies, such as EDR and XDR."
"The user interface of Microsoft 365 Defender could improve. They could make it simpler."
"Improving scalability, especially for very large tenants, could be beneficial for Microsoft Defender XDR."
"The abundance of sub-dashboards and sub-areas within the main dashboard can be confusing, even if it all technically makes sense."
"365 Defender has multiple subsets, including Defender for Cloud Apps. When integrating Defender for Cloud Apps with apps on third-party cloud platforms like AWS or GCP, there are limitations on our ability to control user activities. If Microsoft added more control over third-party products, that would be a game-changer and help us quite a lot."
"They have the worst support, as a company, that I have ever worked with, as they are difficult to get a hold of and keep on the phone. They don't know what they are talking about when you get them on the phone. They don't like to respond to messages when you send them to them. They like to "research problems" for weeks on end, then pass you off to somebody else."
"There are some false positives. What our guys would have liked is that it would have been easier to manipulate as soon as they found a false positive that they knew was a false positive. How to do so was not obvious. Some people complained about it. The interface, the ESM, is not user-friendly."
"It is not a suitable solution if you are looking for a single product with multiple features such as DLP, encryption, rollback, etc."
"They've been having some issues with updating their endpoint agents, and it has been quite frustrating."
"The dashboard is the area that needs to improve so that we can have the ability to drill down without having to go elsewhere to verify results."
"The dashboard could use some significant improvement, just making it more useful with more information. It has a limited amount of information right now. It is customizable, but I'd love to see a better out-of-box dashboard."
"The playbooks could be improved to include more functionalities or actions."
"The setup is quite easy. We had appropriate support from the manager. One thing that was missing was the integration part."
"The grouping feature needs improvement."
"We are now using an external monitoring tool to monitor the services of SentinelOne, because apparently they don't have any solution for that. When the SentinelOne agent is down, you can go to the interface and see a mark on SentinelOne that something is not correct or the server needs to be rebooted, but you will not get an alert. You will not be warned that there is an issue with the SentinelOne agent. I have found that a little bit disturbing, because then we need to use a third-party monitoring tool to make sure that all services of SentinelOne are up and running."
"They have tiers of support like most companies do. For the first three years, we had the top tier of their support and we would get a response from a technician quickly. We didn't have many things we had to ask of them. They would be very quick. We are now one tier down from that. The SLA for us is no longer within an hour or two. It's within half a day or something like that. As far as if I do ask a question of them, it is a little slower than what it used to be. I understand that we're at a lesser tier, but sometimes it feels like that could be a little better. I have to preface that by specifying that we're no longer paying for their top tier support."
"The solution does not have an application security and control module."
"Native integration with the mobile console is an area that can be improved."
"The solution can use up a lot of resources when scanning. It would be ideal if it was lighter."
"One way to improve and get additional benefits would be for SentinelOne to host the updated installer files for us, rather than us having to download and host them ourselves."
"The stability of SentinelOne should be improved."
More Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks Pricing and Cost Advice →
More SentinelOne Singularity Complete Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is ranked 4th in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 80 reviews while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is ranked 2nd in Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) with 177 reviews. Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is rated 8.4, while SentinelOne Singularity Complete is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks writes "Perfect correlation and XDR capabilities for network traffic plus endpoint security". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SentinelOne Singularity Complete writes "Provides peace of mind and is good at ingesting data and correlating". Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, Symantec Endpoint Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, whereas SentinelOne Singularity Complete is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, CrowdStrike Falcon, Darktrace, ThreatLocker Protect and Trend Vision One. See our Cortex XDR by Palo Alto Networks vs. SentinelOne Singularity Complete report.
See our list of best Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) vendors, best Extended Detection and Response (XDR) vendors, and best Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) vendors.
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I haven't used Cortex. My worry with it and every other solution is how well does it perform when disconnected from the cloud/ the internet?
S1 - I have been using it for a couple of years now without an issue. I had been using Cylance prior. I've been very happy with the S1 solution. Works with or without the Internet.
Depends on the size, scope and needs of your environment.
XDR is an ok monitoring/alerting tool, especially if you have a Palo Alto firewall already and everything can integrate well together. However, S1 is a superior tool IMHO and can catch and fix things automatically if you so choose (magic quadrant agrees).
Cost-wise XDR is probably cheaper but I don't know specifics on-prem vs cloud. S1 is a cloud tool but is extremely fast and responsive compared to some other tools we POC'd and can support legacy devices w2k8 and below or Linux or VDI without having to special of workarounds. So again, it depends on your needs, environment and cost.
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto vs. SentinelOne
SentinelOne offers very detailed specifics with regard to risks or attacks. The ability to reverse damage caused by ransomware with minimal interruptions to the environment is note-worthy. Sentinel One works inconspicuously in the background, continually providing protection. It has an automated active EDR that will not only find issues but can fix them. I don’t know that any other solution does that.
Cortex XDR by Palo Alto has a nice console and is easy to use. One of my favorite things about it is that it will automatically connect and log various kinds of suspicious behavior - you don’t need to do it manually. Cortex XDR is very secure but it is missing some basic features. It doesn’t offer an on-prem solution and it doesn’t integrate so well with some third-party solutions.
SentinelOne can be challenging to set up and there seem to be some applications that do not function properly when SentinelOne is installed. I would like to be able to make the reporting more specific to my needs. It would be a more attractive option if the cost was lower.
Conclusions
The find-and-fix option that SentinalOne provides was a huge win for us. We feel it provides a deeper and more thorough level of security.